Free Republic

In less than two weeks, one of the world's biggest democracies will hold what many are describing as its most important presidential election in years. The US has been watching this vote in Brazil closely. Why? There aren't many issues that staunch opponents in Washington ever agree on. But they are united on this. "This is going to be one of the most intense and dramatic elections in the 21st Century," former Trump aide Steve Bannon tells the BBC. "The fate of Brazil's democracy and of US relations with Brazil will be decided in the upcoming election," says Senator Patrick...

Nine U.S. House Democrats have asked the Justice Department to release American environmental lawyer Steven Donziger, who spent decades battling Chevron Corp over pollution in the Ecuadorian rainforest. The disbarred lawyer was handed a six-month imprisonment sentence in October for criminal contempt arising from a lawsuit brought by the oil company. The Democrats including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib on Monday said in a letter addressed to Attorney General Merrick Garland that the lawyer was jailed for "petty contempt of court". "As the United States is a party to the District Court case against Mr. Donziger, we request that you...

Many of us will have felt the grip of claustrophobic isolation over the past year, but the lawyer Steven Donziger has experienced an extreme, very personal confinement as a pandemic arrived and then raged around him in New York City.On Sunday, Donziger reached his 600th day of an unprecedented house arrest that has resulted from a sprawling, Kafkaesque legal battle with the oil giant Chevron. Donziger spearheaded a lengthy crusade against the company on behalf of tens of thousands of Indigenous people in the Amazon rainforest whose homes and health were devastated by oil pollution, only to himself become, as...

The Amazon rainforest may now emit more greenhouse gases than the famously lush ecosystem absorbs, according to new research. Long considered to be a bulwark against climate change because of its capacity to absorb carbon dioxide, a new study suggests rising temperatures, increasing drought and rampant deforestation have likely overwhelmed the Amazon’s ability to absorb more greenhouse gases than it emits, reports Craig Welch for National Geographic. The sobering findings appear in a new study published earlier this month in the journal Frontiers in Forests and Global Change that calculates, for the first time, the net emissions of greenhouse gases...

Actress, author and humanitarian Ashley Judd is recuperating at a South African trauma unit after almost losing a leg in a “catastrophic” fall in a Congo rainforest. In an Instagram Live chat with New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof – watch it below – Judd, speaking from her ICU bed, says she was walking in a Congo rainforest when she tripped over a fallen tree, shattering her leg. Judd, a frequent visitor to Congo, was doing work to track the Bonobos, an endangered great apes species. Describing “an incredibly harrowing 55 hours” during which she was transported, in part by...

...enjoy Macaws, Parrots, Toucans, Hummingbirds, and many other exotic species - even some cute lizards, insects and flowers.

Early inhabitants fertilized the soil with charcoal from fire remains and food waste. Areas with this "dark earth" have a different set of species than the surrounding landscape, contributing to a more diverse ecosystem with a richer collection of plant species, researchers from the State University of Mato Grosso in Brazil and the University of Exeter have found. The legacy of this land management thousands of years ago means there are thousands of these patches of dark earth dotted around the region, most around the size of a small field. This is the first study to measure the difference in...

Some 90 million years ago, a temperate rainforest grew near the South Pole. Scientists recovered fossil traces of the ancient rainforest from seafloor sediment cores collected near West Antarctica's Pine Island Glacier. Seismic data suggested the sediment layer was unique, but researchers weren't expecting to find the remnants of a Cretaceous forest. "The finding of this well preserved 'forest soil' layer was actually a lucky dip," researcher Ulrich Salzmann, professor of palaeoecology at the University of Northumbria in Britain, told UPI. "We did not know of the existence of this layer before." Among the sediment layers, Salzmann and his research...

The increase in fires burning in Brazil set off a storm of international outrage last week. Celebrities, environmentalists, and political leaders blame Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, for destroying the world’s largest rainforest, the Amazon, which they say is the “lungs of the world.”

<p>The far-right populist leader initially dismissed the hundreds of blazes and then questioned whether activist groups might have started the fires in an effort to damage the credibility of his government, which has called for looser environmental regulations in the world’s largest rainforest to spur development.</p>

The official said Brazil's comments and policies over the last few weeks showed that Bolsonaro did not intend to respect obligations on climate change and also did not want to commit on concrete proposals to maintain biodiversity French President Emmanuel Macron believes his Brazilian counterpart Jair Bolsonaro lied to him on Brazil's stance on climate change, and France will now block a trade deal between the EU and South American nations. "Given the attitude of Brazil over the last weeks, the president can only conclude that President Bolsonaro lied to him at the Osaka [G20] summit [in June]," a French...

Social media helped increase coverage of the wildfires, but it's also contributing to misinformation. There's no question that several parts of the Amazon rainforest are on fire, and humans are likely the cause of the blazes. In Brazil alone, there are 80% more fires in 2019 than there were last year, according to the country's space research center. More than half of the fires in Brazil are in its Amazon region. Satellite images are helping show just how many fires there are, and how much of their smoke has spread across the country. But photos on social media are conflating...

Scientists originally discovered hyperaccumulators in the 1970s, and so far over 65 such plants have been identified in New Caledonia, 59 in Turkey, and a few others in countries like Brazil, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines. However, scientists are convinced that many more remain to be discovered. This capacity to store large quantities of heavy metals has been studied by various biological sciences, from molecular biology to physiology and biochemistry, and while much has been learnt about the hyperaccumulation and hypertolerance of zinc and cadmium by some plants, nickel hyperaccumulation mechanisms remain a mystery.The evolution of hyperaccumulators like Pycnandra acuminata is believed to...

Forget small nomadic tribes and pristine jungle: the southern Amazon was likely covered in a network of large villages and ceremonial centers before Columbus. Geoglyphs in the southern Amazon are evidence of a once-thriving population. Photograph courtesy of University of Exeter ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Before Spanish invaders conquered South America, sparse groups of nomadic people clustered around the Amazon River, leaving the surrounding rain forest pristine and untouched. Or did they? New research suggests a very different story—an Amazonian region peppered with rain forest villages, ceremonial earthworks, and a much larger population than previously thought. The research, funded in part by the...

Parts of the Amazon previously thought to have been uninhabited were home to thriving populations of up to a million people from as early as 1250 AD, research shows. Archaeologists have uncovered evidence there were up to 1,500 fortified villages in the rainforest away from major rivers - two-thirds of which are yet to be discovered. By analysing charcoal remains and excavated pottery, researchers found a 1,100-mile (1,800km) stretch of southern Amazonia that was continuously occupied from 1250 until 1500 AD. People had assumed ancient communities had preferred to live near these waterways, but the new evidence shows this was...

Carson and his colleagues wanted to explore the question of whether early Amazonians had a major impact on the forest. They focused on the Amazon of northeastern Bolivia, where they had sediment cores from two lakes nearby major earthworks sites. These sediment cores hold ancient pollen grains and charcoal from long-ago fires, and can hint at the climate and ecosystem that existed when the sediment was laid down as far back as 6,000 years ago. An examination of the two cores — one from the large lake, Laguna Oricore, and one from the smaller lake, Laguna Granja — revealed a...

Look around the Amazon rainforest today and it’s hard to imagine it filled with people. But in recent decades, archaeologists have started to find evidence that before Columbus’s arrival, the region was dotted with towns and perhaps even cities. The extent of human settlement in the Amazon remains hotly debated, partly because huge swaths of the 6-million-square-kilometer rainforest remain unstudied by archaeologists. Now, researchers have built a model predicting where signs of pre-Columbian agriculture are most likely to be found, a tool they hope will help guide future archaeological work in the region. In many ways, archaeology in the Amazon...

Previously unknown archeological sites in forest islands reveal human presence in the western Amazon as early as 10,000 years ago, according to research published August 28 in the open access journal PLOS ONE by Umberto Lombardo from the University of Bern, Switzerland and colleagues from other institutions. The study focuses on a region in the Bolivian Amazon thought to be rarely occupied by pre-agricultural communities due to unfavorable environmental conditions. Hundreds of 'forest islands'- small forested mounds of earth- are found throughout the region, their origins attributed to termites, erosion or ancient human activity. In this study, the authors report...

A series of ancient underwater etchings has been uncovered near the jungle city of Manaus, following a drought in the Brazilian Amazon. The previously submerged images -- engraved on rocks and possibly up to 7,000 years old -- were reportedly discovered by a fisherman after the Rio Negro, a tributary of the Amazon river, fell to its lowest level in more than 100 years last month... Though water levels are now rising again, partly covering the apparently stone age etchings, local researchers photographed them before they began to disappear under the river's dark waters. Archaeologists who have studied the photographs...

To the untrained eye, all evidence here in the heart of the Amazon signals virgin forest, untouched by man for time immemorial - from the ubiquitous fruit palms to the cry of howler monkeys, from the air thick with mosquitoes to the unruly tangle of jungle vines. Archaeologists, many of them Americans, say the opposite is true: This patch of forest, and many others across the Amazon, was instead home to an advanced, even spectacular civilization that managed the forest and enriched infertile soil to feed thousands. The findings are discrediting a once-bedrock theory of archaeology that long held that...